A bit of the aftermath
Posted: Mon Oct 12, 2020 12:11 am
The forest just reopened, so I went up to check out the damage. It's not that bad!
There's lots of signage at the bottom of hwy 39 (the mountain section, anyway) saying that the canyon is very closed. This is no longer the case, I guess they haven't yet bothered to remove the signs. The road to Crystal Lake is clear. The cafe is open, and Adam is stoked the that the Crystal Lake area has been mostly untouched. And the visitors are too. I guess the campgrounds are still closed and the state park says that their trails are closed too. Probably they're just behind, like caltrans with their signage.
From the campgrounds, there's very little sign of the fire: the slope directly West of the lake has burned. More on that later. I rode up the dirt road to South Mount Hawkins. The road is chunky
Snowslide canyon is flowing, and the road crossing is washed out.
Eventually I summited South Mount Hawkins.
And could look West to see the fire damage.
As usual, click to get the full-resolution image. The good news is that in these views significantly less than half of the burn area actually burned. It looks like the previous Triplet Rocks experience is still available. And the Mermaids. Mt Waterman and Twin Peaks look good. Looks not-so-great right above Bear Creek, but OK further up. The burned slopes are very patchy. Towards the right of the second image is the slope that burned down to Crystal lake. And there's another burned patch of this ridge further South, near where the 39 closure is, but that's it for the Crystal Lake side of the ridge.
Looking a bit to the North, Mt Islip looks just fine:
I then went North, along Hawkins Ridge. Most of this isn't near the fire, but towards the North end of it, near point 8505 I started seeing Phos-chek.
It's everywhere
And here we can see the burns on the back side of the range. Mt Lewis and the areas below Hwy 2 running towards Dawson saddle didn't do so well:
However it must have burned cold. The burns are sparse, and the pines still have their needles in many cases. Hwy 2 was a very effective firebreak here. Looking the other way is Windy Gap, Islip, PVR, Little Jimmy and Williamson.
Islip looks mostly unscathed. The big burned out thing in the middle with the trail running across is the PCT between the Little Jimmy spring and Little Jimmy camp. More on that in a bit since I'm about to go over there. Looks like the PCT further back, between Little Jimmy and Islip Saddle got hit hard. From this angle, Williamson has a badly burned section left of the peak. Better photos of that later.
I dropped down to Windy Gap. Phos-chek!
Little Jimmy spring is doing great.
These trees saw a cold fire, or maybe these are burns from some older fire (since the little plants at the base aren't burnt)
Immediately past that is the burned section we saw from above earlier. Several little gullies got incinerated.
But as before, the damage is very localized. Getting closer to the camp, it's just little isolated pockets of damage. There was a tree here:
And here the ground burned, but the trees survived
Some post-fire cleanup
There was a forest service fire truck at the camp, and since I was slightly in the closure area, I didn't enter. Here's the view into the camp from the East:
Not bad! I should say, there's no signage about closures yet. I went back around towards Mt Islip. The upper trail view into the camp:
The fire that incinerated the gullies beneath must have been small here, since the upper trail worked as a fire break
If it's not clear, the area left of the trail is all ash. I summitted Mt Islip. The summit area is full of Phos-chek, but completely undamaged. View of the North ridge:
There're some charred spots down the North ridge, but it's just spots. Lots of tape demarcations here
I tried to get a view down into Bear Creek, but it's way too hazy down there. It kinda looks like there's smoke still. Between the two trees in the middle:
And dead center of the photo:
In both cases it dissipated quickly, so maybe it's not smoke. Probably there's a lot of ash, and if a rock falls, you get a cloud. Whatever it is, you can't see into that draingage. The slopes coming out of Bear Creek towards Hwy 2 don't look so good. Here's Mt Williamson from the summit of Islip:
There's the big burned section left of the summit, and another below and left of that. That's where the PCT switch-backs are. And in the foreground is (I think) more of Islip's north ridge. Not too terrible.
And because I can, here's Crystal Lake from Islip:
That's all I got. Huge relief to see just how much of the forest was spared. Would be great to see Bear Creek and Buckhorn and West Fork. So somebody go do that, please
There's lots of signage at the bottom of hwy 39 (the mountain section, anyway) saying that the canyon is very closed. This is no longer the case, I guess they haven't yet bothered to remove the signs. The road to Crystal Lake is clear. The cafe is open, and Adam is stoked the that the Crystal Lake area has been mostly untouched. And the visitors are too. I guess the campgrounds are still closed and the state park says that their trails are closed too. Probably they're just behind, like caltrans with their signage.
From the campgrounds, there's very little sign of the fire: the slope directly West of the lake has burned. More on that later. I rode up the dirt road to South Mount Hawkins. The road is chunky
Snowslide canyon is flowing, and the road crossing is washed out.
Eventually I summited South Mount Hawkins.
And could look West to see the fire damage.
As usual, click to get the full-resolution image. The good news is that in these views significantly less than half of the burn area actually burned. It looks like the previous Triplet Rocks experience is still available. And the Mermaids. Mt Waterman and Twin Peaks look good. Looks not-so-great right above Bear Creek, but OK further up. The burned slopes are very patchy. Towards the right of the second image is the slope that burned down to Crystal lake. And there's another burned patch of this ridge further South, near where the 39 closure is, but that's it for the Crystal Lake side of the ridge.
Looking a bit to the North, Mt Islip looks just fine:
I then went North, along Hawkins Ridge. Most of this isn't near the fire, but towards the North end of it, near point 8505 I started seeing Phos-chek.
It's everywhere
And here we can see the burns on the back side of the range. Mt Lewis and the areas below Hwy 2 running towards Dawson saddle didn't do so well:
However it must have burned cold. The burns are sparse, and the pines still have their needles in many cases. Hwy 2 was a very effective firebreak here. Looking the other way is Windy Gap, Islip, PVR, Little Jimmy and Williamson.
Islip looks mostly unscathed. The big burned out thing in the middle with the trail running across is the PCT between the Little Jimmy spring and Little Jimmy camp. More on that in a bit since I'm about to go over there. Looks like the PCT further back, between Little Jimmy and Islip Saddle got hit hard. From this angle, Williamson has a badly burned section left of the peak. Better photos of that later.
I dropped down to Windy Gap. Phos-chek!
Little Jimmy spring is doing great.
These trees saw a cold fire, or maybe these are burns from some older fire (since the little plants at the base aren't burnt)
Immediately past that is the burned section we saw from above earlier. Several little gullies got incinerated.
But as before, the damage is very localized. Getting closer to the camp, it's just little isolated pockets of damage. There was a tree here:
And here the ground burned, but the trees survived
Some post-fire cleanup
There was a forest service fire truck at the camp, and since I was slightly in the closure area, I didn't enter. Here's the view into the camp from the East:
Not bad! I should say, there's no signage about closures yet. I went back around towards Mt Islip. The upper trail view into the camp:
The fire that incinerated the gullies beneath must have been small here, since the upper trail worked as a fire break
If it's not clear, the area left of the trail is all ash. I summitted Mt Islip. The summit area is full of Phos-chek, but completely undamaged. View of the North ridge:
There're some charred spots down the North ridge, but it's just spots. Lots of tape demarcations here
I tried to get a view down into Bear Creek, but it's way too hazy down there. It kinda looks like there's smoke still. Between the two trees in the middle:
And dead center of the photo:
In both cases it dissipated quickly, so maybe it's not smoke. Probably there's a lot of ash, and if a rock falls, you get a cloud. Whatever it is, you can't see into that draingage. The slopes coming out of Bear Creek towards Hwy 2 don't look so good. Here's Mt Williamson from the summit of Islip:
There's the big burned section left of the summit, and another below and left of that. That's where the PCT switch-backs are. And in the foreground is (I think) more of Islip's north ridge. Not too terrible.
And because I can, here's Crystal Lake from Islip:
That's all I got. Huge relief to see just how much of the forest was spared. Would be great to see Bear Creek and Buckhorn and West Fork. So somebody go do that, please